dan/california

Agreed. But of course, while the USMAAG bodycount metrics (e.g. 'the Five O'Clock Follies') were pants for countless reasons, the Viet Cong were indeed being steadily bled white, as everyone from Giap on down admitted after the victory.
I don't know if there's a strict correlation from buckets of blood to territorial losses; we believe that the boundary fortifications built from 2014-2022 are a lot harder to replace once lost, and that seems to make intuitive sense.
...But beyond that, who the hell knows what a square km, or a shattered hamlet, is worth militarily? As @The_Capt noted thousands of pages ago, just how valuable is 'high ground' nowadays in the FPV era?  A nice marshy streambed or wooded balka, otoh, is still tactically useful.

Probably Russians are pissed with the latest ATACMS strikes and hitting in blind revenge mode 

https://www.politico.eu/article/vladimir-putin-russia-diesel-prices-skyrocket-ukraine-war-drone-strikes-oil-refineries/

Indiscriminate brutality vs a photogenic target?

Nothing like kicking US military aid out of the headlines and getting back to how the war is horrible and the Russian behemoth isn't going to stop.

I guess a problem for reporting losses by respectable media outlets is that you can't really verify the numbers. Both sides lie, and they would be nuts if they didn't. So there are basically only rumors to report, and it's IMHO better that they don't.
Another problem is sources. If the news channels don't have their own teams, they have to use 'official' material. Again, that will be propaganda from both sides, some side more than the other (ahem).
We are used to watching Twitter videos. But those are all 'unverified' and you can understand them only in context. Another thing that makes them unusable for mass media.
This war is a difficult topic. Even though this is the one war since WWII where it's clearest which side are the baddies.

Let's hope these are headed for Ukraine soon:
https://www.idf.il/אתרי-יחידות/יומן-המלחמה/כל-הכתבות/כתבות-ייזומות/מערכת-הנשק-פטריוט-מסיימת-את-שירותה-בחיל-האוויר/
 

The counter point to this is that Russia has somehow managed to survive as an inherently unstable imperial state (in its current size) for over 300 years. It has collapsed twice before but always has come back as an imperial state.  There are more than a few theories on how this keeps happening; my personal favourite is that Russia exists because geopolitically it has been rejected- not European, not Asian, not Persian. That rejection has become an identity in itself: Russia - the original punk-state.
Regardless of how it happened, one has to admit Russia keeps going long after it should.  That quality appears baked into the culture and identity. I also think this war may likely break the current incarnation of the Russian state.  Pressures that have been set in motion may unite a people in the short term but will very well break it in the long term. Russia is very likely going to remain isolated from the West for a long time after this war.  It will also very likely be pulled into the Chinese power sphere - although that relationship has always been weird.
Bur what is very important here is the speed of a Russian collapse.  A slow rattling decline is something we can manage.  A collapse that takes 20-30 years can be boxed up and contained.  When it hits the tipping point it will still seem dramatic but a slow motion collapse, much like the last one with the fall of the Soviet Union is always the preferred option.  It is the fast uncontrolled collapse that must be avoided.  A collapse without mitigations in place.  Too many unknowns, too much energy released too fast.  
The strategic options spaces get far too stark and frankly untenable in this scenario.  We will very likely fail to make the brutal decisions required if Russia plummets suddenly. The result risks runaway mechanisms that could wind up making the entire region (if not the globe) much worse.  And there has been far too much hand waving on this point - “Ya,ya, whatever…but Ukraine!” This reality is why we are not conducting NATO airstrikes into Russia and putting western troops on the ground.
So we take the slow road. Contain but fuel the conflict. Hoping Russia runs out of gas slowly. Hoping Putin will have a sudden “health crisis”.  It is often said in military circles that “hope is not an option”.  I always smirk at this one because historically it has very often been the only option.  We keep things rolling in the hopes a better option will emerge.  Hope is a child of uncertainty, and we are very uncertain right now.

Even putting losses into the equation is not really happening.
I dont think Ive heard a single take on the difference between the near collapse of the russian front in 22 when they left brigades worth of intact equiptment to flee with civilian vehicles to the ww1 style mass casulties forward inching we have now where the only thing captured is ruins and rubble.
I saw a 7 minute video of a russian walking through his position yesterday. Every 2-3meters you'd see a russian lying in the earth. I counted more than 100 dead bodies and even more left behind gear indicating people that were recovered there, dead or alive.
The pg13 ones that dont need to be blurred that showcase the insane amount of burnt tank columns dont make it to the outside media either. 
If it was really about "shock-media" in the west Id think they'd play those sorts of Videos @Yet

This totally makes sense, because L39 barrels are all but obsolete. The first tier standard going forward is going to guns that shoot 45 or 50 kilometers with more or less normal ammunition, and double that with the fancy stuff. L52 barrels are just one of the things that are absolutely required to make that happen.
I am not saying they are useless in Ukraine BTW, I am saying all of the vehicles in the general class of L39 barreled SPGs are a rapidly wasting asset, and most of the ones that exist anywhere n NATO ought to be on the way to Ukraine. The manufacturing rate for newer systems obviously needs to go WAY up.

Better late than never...

Drones the size of the smaller FPV drones are remarkably quiet and hard to spot.
I was cycling up in the mountains this weekend and we suddenly heard the whirrrrrr of a drone as it zipped by about 50 feet overhead.  We didn't hear it come in, and once it was across the road maybe another 100 feet further it was inaudible.  There was a stiff crosswind, but that was literally the only source of noise to mask the drone - the only traffic to speak of was the pickup truck that showed up shortly afterward that shot ahead of us and parked to land the drone on the hood.  We didn't see the drone again until it was landing on the hood, even though it was broad daylight and we knew where the person controlling it was sitting.

FancyCat, edited for concision:
A drawn-out war is bad for Ukraine. We don't know what might bring Russia to ceasefire negotiations. The best way to bring them to the table is to fight to win the war. Russia will keep the war going if it is to their advantage. The west is not fighting to win, Russia is taking advantage of Western lack of commitment. Russia is using Western fears of Russian collapse and nuclear war to it's advantage, actively promoting such a narrative for it's benefit rather than because it is a realistic one. Russia seems to be pursuing maximal goals.  The west must signal that these cannot be achieved. Why should the west make concessions as Russia does not.  Russia does not offer a negotiation, rather demands surrender, disarmament and fomalisation of annexed land  
The_Capt, edited for concision:
Preamble: You are ignoring reality. The best becomes the enemy of the good. We have a phrase for that in Army.
The Russian regime might collapse. This would be a risk. You think the only way to win is for the Russia to collapse. Russia doesn't need to collapse for there to be peace. You think Ukraine must have total victory and anything else is defeat.  This is holding you back. (6.1) WW3 would be bad, Ukraine is not worth that.  War is costly.  We can simultaniously support Ukrainian resistance and pull back to a new iron curtain behind which could sit a well funded NATO. (6.2) Maximal goals are not the only form of victory. We are looking at a ceasefire scenario with half of Ukraine in Russian hands. (6.3) We must fight to achieve a better negotiating position, this might require Russia to collapse. (6.4) Your argument helps the enemy, by making the war unwinnable, and might encourage people to give up support if it does not achieve total vicory.  This is what Russia wants.  
I feel simply summarising the main points of the exchange as I have here should suffice as a critique.  It took me an hour or so.

This totally makes sense, because L39 barrels are all but obsolete. The first tier standard going forward is going to guns that shoot 45 or 50 kilometers with more or less normal ammunition, and double that with the fancy stuff. L52 barrels are just one of the things that are absolutely required to make that happen.
I am not saying they are useless in Ukraine BTW, I am saying all of the vehicles in the general class of L39 barreled SPGs are a rapidly wasting asset, and most of the ones that exist anywhere n NATO ought to be on the way to Ukraine. The manufacturing rate for newer systems obviously needs to go WAY up.

I fully agree it would take some sort of epic crack up in the Putin regime for Ukraine to get it all back. But if the regimes DOES crack their are simply so many ways it could go all anybody will be able to do is try to surf the avalanche. 

Not unrelated, but the UK army started receiving its first Archer artillery systems (L52) from Sweden in early 2023, so yes, they are basically shipping the AS-90s to Ukraine as they are being replaced in active service by new systems.
I believe Sweden have also sent some Archers to Ukraine, so they're getting some more modern systems too, not just stuff that's being retired. Archer I think is on a par with the French Caesars that are getting a lot of praise.

article on Japan's ruling coalition seeking to loosen restrictions that may allow it to export to Ukraine. Hopefully Ukraine has a good embassy there to push it. 
https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/Defense/Japan-weighs-weapon-exports-to-nations-under-invasionhttps://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/Defense/Japan-weighs-weapon-exports-to-nations-under-invasion
 

Because it is an easy-to-understand metric that is good to measure and visualize.
Single value metrics for complex systems usually suck. Better metrics are hard to understand unless you know what's going on. Since the public does not, its km^2.

I am on The_Capt's side on this one. Armored vehicles that have had to preemptively blind themselves to stay alive the last five or ten kilometers have reduced their effectiveness by 80 or 90%. Also the counters to this are extremely obvious. Drones will get a little bigger, an optimized warhead will be developed, and last but not least all the home on jam experiments that have to be underway somewhere will ramp up into production. What tanks need to do to remain useful in the next turn of the cycle is rather less obvious, because as we have discussed any number of times, the just can't get any heavier, and a practical matter they are ALREADY to expensive

I am on The_Capt's side on this one. Armored vehicles that have had to preemptively blind themselves to stay alive the last five or ten kilometers have reduced their effectiveness by 80 or 90%. Also the counters to this are extremely obvious. Drones will get a little bigger, an optimized warhead will be developed, and last but not least all the home on jam experiments that have to be underway somewhere will ramp up into production. What tanks need to do to remain useful in the next turn of the cycle is rather less obvious, because as we have discussed any number of times, the just can't get any heavier, and a practical matter they are ALREADY to expensive

Yeah, people forget that the advent of cheap, powerful and energy efficient computing is upon us. This is what enables quadcopters to fly, cell phones to do all sorts of fancy image processing, etc.
Whenever someone questions cheap precision, I gotta wonder if they’ve ever touched a smartphone in the last decade.

This is a hack to survive the current cycle. For the specific conditions the Russians face- numerically inferior enemy with lots of FPVs with small warheads, and lots of Russian meat and ****ty old armor- this works fine.

I question stats like this.  The paper uses Jack Walting out of RUSSI, who are a pretty good bunch, but the ref in the paper is not a citation, it basically says "Jack said so".  So when was this in the war?  Excalibur rounds come with inertial guidance for just this reason - GPS jamming.  We know there have been continual upgrades and revisions to deal with the EW environment.  Are these rounds at 7% now?  Where did Jack get this number?
We know EW will remain a thing, but autonomy is the offset and it is accelerating.  The Excalibur round started development in the 90s and has been on the battlefield for nearly 20 years:
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M982_Excalibur
We need to really remember that a lot of the miltech we are seeing is actually one or two generations old. So this makes predictions even harder.  We do not know what is out there with respect to PGM and counters, nor what is on drawing boards.  My sense within the business is that cheap precise is accelerating, while the very expensive counters are behind the curve, but time will tell.

First off, we know that the UA has more than "just FPVs".  Even though supplies and ammunition of some natures, some critical were low, the entire UA did not run out of ATGMs, AT systems, landmines, direct fires and indirect fires.  Ukraine clearly does have weaponry to destroy "sheds-on-tracks" because we just saw video of exactly that.
What I did not see was a successful infantry assault, nor can a tank or IFV boxed in by a metal shed effectively provide fires support to infantry...because the entire freakin turret is in a giant box!  Russians have been stupid in the past, this entire bloody war is a monument to stupidity, but even if they are being clever now, this is desperate clever.  They are eroding expensive military capability on their own...Ukraine doesn't even need to do it for them.  They are doing so in the hope they can somehow take 100m at a time.  Which, btw is fine, so long as each 100m costs them 3-4 AFVs and platoon of infantry.  By the map it is 21km to Pokrovsk and 32 kms to Kostyantynivka, which are the closest things to actual operational objectives (immediate objectives mind you).  At this burn rate Russia will lose 6300 troops and 630 AFVs to get to Pokrovsk alone.  That is an entire Bde+.  And here is the the thing...they are not even advancing that quickly.  Their burn rate is actually much higher.
And here is another thing...if they can take Pokrovsk...they still have 236 kms to Poltava.  Which as a minimum is what they are going to need to do to cut the UA line in half and truly threaten it and Kharkiv - assuming they can somehow make a drive/link up with Sumy.
The problem we are having on this forum right now is the exact opposite of what all the experts had at the beginning of the war.  They were all looking macro and ignoring micro, we were not and saw things they missed.  Now we are all looking micro and extrapolating it up wildly to macro.  A few sheds on Russian tanks is not a sign that Russia has somehow solved for FPVs and now can make a Costco-garage-drive to freakin Kyiv.  It is a sign that they are running out of ideas, not cracking the code with some sort of mystic Russian military prowess.